We’re having a party next Wednesday in New York at KGB Bar to celebrate the release of issue 35 (“What is violence for?”)—join us!Entry is free, and we’ll be selling copies of the new issue at a discount.
RSVPing is optional but welcome. Also optional but welcome: bringing friends, and brushing up on essays in the issue by some of our contributors in and around the city.
While I was reading Porn I wandered around recording half-coherent voice messages to my friends in which I tried to articulate the discomfiting impression that this book was a covert manifesto about the shamefulness and perversion of porn, disguised as a book designed to contribute to our liberation from shame about porn. The questions that Barton refused to ask pressed me with escalating force: Why do we find porn so scary? What’s happening in the mainstream images that Barton is so quick to characterize as degradation and violence? What is degradation and violence, in sex and in porn?
Russia’s revolutionaries helped invent modern terrorism, in which acts of largely symbolic political violence are amplified and sensationalized via the mass media. Much more than historical curiosities, these Russian stories are a reminder that when there is glaring injustice with no freedom to vote, to speak out, to organize, or even to offer humanitarian aid, those dissatisfied with the status quo may turn to murderous spectacle. The narrower the channel of dissent, the fiercer the stream.
Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial. Indeed, unless we see such substitutions, however flawed and incomplete, as part of humanity’s broader historical attempt to renounce its own violence, we are likely to share Foucault’s perspective.
In a society that is adamant, if hypocritical, in its moral rejection of violence, the ubiquity of such violent imagery seems to have its own kind of purpose. It seems cathartic, or psychically protective—a safe ritual that admits the reality of violence and cruelty while also warding it off, like a ceremonial demon mask. Maybe it’s even necessary, a way to propitiate the inhuman mechanism that expresses itself through humanity.
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
